Proposed the idea of a Liberty Machine (aka Fuller’s “design science revolution,” in which I stated as long ago as 1994 that “copyleft” and “open source” publishing was a major step toward fulfilling).

The philosophy outlined in many of his books is that the
organizations in our society no longer work for human welfare but only
toward their own survival, and no amount of reform will change that —
there’s a need to reorganize, to redefine our institutions, and to get
science back into the hands of the people — so that efficient
organizations can be made by the people, via technology.

A book about metalanguage, printed on multiple colored paper where
the text for each color concerns one aspect of the book’s message, and
is written in a particular style (one of the styles is the poetic
diction that appears in many of Fuller’s books of the period).

He suggests that humankind is moving from the management of
physical objects (as “homo faber”) to managing complexity itself —
and proposes a new term for this new man: “homo gubernator”

Money-as-metric-of-wealth is obsolete and must be replaced.

Introduces the idea of a Liberty Machine, a
system whose output is liberty. If “information” is defined as “that
which changes us,” a redefinition of “liberty” for the information era
can be thus: “competent information is free to act.” It’s on this
principle of liberty that a Liberty Machine should be designed.

Transcription of a series of radio lectures on the cybernetic
redesign of society for the purpose of human liberty. A must read!

“I believe that the society of conspicuous consumption is proving to be
the most alienating force the world has ever known.”

Science, as used in this consumptive society, is being used to
“destroy man — in his humanity and in his joy of living.” Science
must go indie. It must be controlled by the people, and not
corporations. [One example: the Debian Project]

Invisible power structures are part of the environment. These
institutions are systems, and were set up ages ago to handle a
now-outdated amount of variety (the number of possible states
of a system); the systems must now be redesigned:

“I am proposing simply that society should use its tools toredesign its institutions, and to operate those institutions
quite differently.”

The main tools to do this, says Beer, are “the electronic computer,
telecommunications, and the techniques of cybernetics. …”

In the 1990s, Beer invented Team Syntegrity, where the shape of a
polyhedra (namely, an icosahedron) is used as the democratic
non-hierarchical structure of organization for the purposes of group
facilitation. Each member is a vertex on the icosahedron, and feedback
from their input and decisions reverberates around the entire
structure. The facilitation or problem-solving process using this
model is called a “syntegration.”

While Fuller never explicitly nominated or discussed the conceptual tetrahedron as an
organizational framework and information processing circuit, his work is replete with clues
and inference about it — which led me to begin developing, thinking about and considering
the tetrahedron as a model for organization, strategic thinking and planning, and,
information processing…